The famous Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as
a very honest and wise judge, was in the habit of asking, time and
again, 'To whose benefit?'

Thus writes Marcus Tullius Cicero in his famous
"Pro Roscio Amerino."
Roscius of Ameria was a notoriously-accused patricide, and Cicero's
speech was in his defence. Roscius was almost certainly innocent of
the crime, and the accusation was notorious because it was part of the
dictator Sulla's "enemies list" project. Cicero's speech is considered
an essential document of Roman history. You should read it.

A conversation on Travis Eby's page about agorism prompted me to think
about this question. Who benefits? In particular, who benefits from
you being in a condition of learned helplessness?

You say you aren't? But I suspect that you really are. Do you grow
your own food? Do you have food at home sufficient to feed yourself
for a year? Do you have your own water well? Do you have your own
weapons? Can you and your family defend your homestead from all
comers? I suspect that the answer is no, in a very great many cases.

"No," you say, "I can't do all that, but I have no need. Division of
labour works great. The economy is just fine. The people who put
chlorine and fluoride and possibly other poisons in my drinking water
are excellent folks who send me a monthly bill which is paid by
automatic deduction from my bank account. Really, I don't even glance
at it."

Yes, division of labour works, but who benefits? Specialisation works
to make it possible for you to apply only a particular set of skills
while deriving sufficient economic surplus to let you pay rent, buy
water, shop for groceries and sundries, and pay really a huge amount
in taxessales taxes, inventory taxes, property taxes, gasoline
taxes, income taxes, withholding taxes, excise taxes, import taxes,
export licence fees, etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

Who benefits from having a poor public education "system" that
produces extremely few graduates with basic literacy, basic
mathematics skills, basic knowledge of science? Who benefits from you
being unable on your own land, or in a window box, or in a hydroponic
grow room, to feed yourself? Who benefits from your dependence on
calling the police in case of prowlers or burglars? Who benefits from
you not being "allowed" to have a water well inside the city limits?
Who benefits from the licence tags and licence papers and other
documentations you are expected to have?

Does it matter? Probably, in the enduring time and lasting scheme of
things, it matters who gains these benefits. Almost certainly a
careful examination would show that banking gangsters, tax collectors,
and the beneficiaries of the system of taxation and control, notably
military contractors and construction contractors (nationally and
locally) are gaining from the added economic production you are
capable of by reason of you specialising in some particular craft or
tradeand thereby having no time to train with weapons or grow your
own food, let alone go out and hunt or fish. Do you even know how to
fish? Could you set a snare, gut a rabbit, tickle a fish, if you were
starving?

In the scope of your own self-interest, the main thing to notice is
that the answer to "who benefits" is "not you." You do not benefit.
You went to school a very long time to get good grades, and your
parents were proud. You went to college and got excellent grades. You
went to graduate school and got excellent grades. You did a
post-doctoral activity, and praises were heaped upon you. And finally
you became who you are today, a scholar, a doctor, a lawyer, an
architect, a merchant, a tradesman. Substitute any number of technical
or vocational learning experiences and you became a master
electrician, plumber, computer technician, carpenter, or auto mechanic.

Nor is there any shame in it. But there is not as much benefit as you
were told to expect. And if your clothes are ragged, can you mend a
seam? If you have ambition to put in a bomb shelter, can you run the
electrical system? How about plumbing? Can you design and implement a
staircase? Can excess fruit from your garden? Build raised beds to
maximise productivity from limited acreage? Track game?

Who benefits from you not being able to do all these things? You don't.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a
sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,
take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations,
analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty
meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."
Robert Heinlein

If you can't do some or all these things, wouldn't you be better off
if you were to learn?

Consider the last time a globe-dominating empire fell into ruin. Oh,
say, 1991? Okay, let's go back further. Consider the fall of Rome. Not
the causes, because we don't like empires, and figuring out why one
fell in the expectation that one might prevent another from falling
isn't the idea here. Consider the results.

For millions of people all over Europe, it was freedom. Towns all over
the empire would open their gates to the barbarians because the
barbarians demanded 10% in tribute, and Rome demanded 30% or more. The
barbarians would also happily kill the Roman senators, bureau-rats,
and soldiers living inside the walls, taking away many useless mouths.
Senators had a habit in those days of taking from a land owner his
land, or choice parcels, or his wife, or his favourite horse, or
anything else. And what were you going to do about it, squire? Well,
after a while, you were going to open the gates to the barbarians,
that's what.

So this "dark age" that the elitists talk about was nothing of the
sort. Learning became much more widespread. Technologies advanced very
rapidly. Small holders became wealthy. Yeomen had tools for
self-defence. Thousands of principalities, free towns, leagues,
guilds, mutual societies, monasteries, churches, and schools of all
sizes were founded.

If anything, the Roman republic with its slaughter of Archimedes and
burning of the libraries at Carthage and elsewhere, and the Roman
empire with its sundry library burnings, slaughter, pillaging, etc.,
were the dark age. Certainly the age of unreason.

By the beginning of the 13th Century there were universities all over
Europe. Communication with very friendly people in the Islamic
Caliphate provided copies in Arabic of texts from Greece and Rome. The
zero was imported from India. Arabic numerals and algebra and
astronomy and medicine were flooding through Europe like nobody's
business. In England the yeomen archers got together with some of the
more parliamentary barons and forced the king, a nasty get named Johnafter
whom toilets and privies have been named ever sincewas
forced to sign Magna Carta. And Magna Carta guaranteed the right of
Englishmen to keep and bear arms, forever. So much for documentary
freedom, "freedom by law" and such trifles, huh?

But look you, it all fell apart. The clearances. The enclosures. The
small holders were driven from their farms, forced into the cities,
put into mines to die of lung disease, forced into factories to be
mutilated by machinery, or transported to Virginia colony or Botany
Bay. And for what? For whose benefit?

For the benefit of the banking gangsters, the elitists, the
militarists, the tax collectors, the worthless filth who think they
should run your life. They cannot even run their own lives, but they
are eager to ruin yours.

So, what to do? My friend L. Neil Smith thinks we should revisit the
agricultural revolution of roughly 12,000 BC or so (judging by the
ruins of some of the oldest cities we think we've found, places like
Jericho, e.g.) put the asteroid Pallas in a ziplock bag, and set up a
hunting preserve for ourselves and our posterity. For my part, I see
nothing wrong with this design objective.

If your ambition is a bit smaller, consider growing your own
vegetables, or some fruit trees. Last year, I bought bush beans
instead of pole beans. I thought to plant them anyway in the
expectation of eating beans. I discovered that the rabbits had other
ideas. So I wasn't raising beans, I was raising rabbits. Yummy.

Agorism has great potential for reducing the amount you contribute to
your own oppression. By learning to do it yourself, or by trading very
privately with people you trust, or by trading using advanced
encryption technologies so that nobody can detect your economic
transactions, you contribute less money to the system that oppresses
you, and me. Moreover, you improve your privacy by getting off the
grid, finding your own water in the back yard, digging a well under
your house, using alternative energy sources, finding a virtual
privacy network to mask your Internet presence, and adding e-mail
encryption to the things you understand.

Why not? You can see how you benefit from these things. As my friend
Travis pointed out, you can see how the environment may also benefit,
too. And that can be goodyou like a clean neighbourhood, pretty
flowers in the garden, fresh air. You also benefit from a planet that
doesn't become un-liveable.

Who benefits from the BP oil spill? BP did stand to make billions from
sucking the oil out of the sea bed. BP shareholders, including a lot
of useless pensioners in Britain, would stand to gain from all that
wealth. Who benefits from exploiting this opportunity to push stupid
legislation through Congress, cut off oil drilling in the USA, and
further limiting the market for energy? Big oil companies, powerful
senators, and those who run the state, and their cronies. Not you.

Who benefits from you not being able to grow your own food? The
grocer, the jobber, the warehouse, the grain elevator operator, the
big agribiz companies, the Monsanto genetically modified organism
pushers. Not you. You get to eat whatever crap they are willing to
sell you, and get told to like it. Grow your own tomatoes and taste a
really delicious tomato whenever you please. Buy store-bought tomatoes
and you get very little tomato experience. Go to your local farmer's
market and meet people who know all about food, and have some of the
most delicious produce you'll ever see. Bring along some silver coins,
see how much further your grocery budget goes.

You have no obligation to the people who run the state. You have no
obligation to the pensioners in Britain. You have no obligation to the
banking gangsters. If the national debt goes unpaid, how is that any
concern of yours?

And if you cannot live without the sundry services provided by
government, whose fault is that? How long does it take to buy a gun,
buy some ammo, take a class, and learn how to put rounds at the target
down range? And from that point on, to turn money into skill by
keeping up your target practice? Don't like guns? The compound bow is
cheap, the arrows are re-usable, you can get war heads for cheap at
Wal-mart (war heads being the kind of arrow heads you shoot at game
and enemiestarget heads being much less pointy), and the bow is
very quiet. Twang.

Who benefits? Isn't it time that the beneficiary was you? I think so.
Which is why I am inviting all my friends to learn and to teach at the
Individual Sovereign University.

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Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, and anti-war activist. His
1990 venture to offer a sweepstakes trip into space was destroyed by
government action as was his free port and prospective space port in
Somalia in 2001. His 2002-2007 venture in free market money and
private stock exchange was destroyed by government action in 2007.
He's going to Mars if he has to walk. His second book, Being
Sovereign is now availble from
Lulu
and Amazon.
His third book Sovereign Self-Defense will be
released for Kindle soon. His fourth book Being Libertarian
will be available for free download as a .pdf, being a compilation of
all his essays and letters in "The Libertarian Enterprise" since 1995.
Contact him at indomitus.net or indsovu.com He and his associates at
Individual Sovereign University are planning a series of concerts and
celebrations of freedom around the world. One of these events is in
March 2011 in Kansas City, Missouri.